A String of Beads (Jane Whitefield, #8)(9)

Grown-up Jane climbed the fence at a post, swung a leg over and set her toe in a link on the far side, lowered herself to the ground, then trotted across the field to the center strip and began to look to the right, barely pausing in the trees before she crossed the last two lanes. When she got to the second fence she dropped her backpack on the other side and stepped on the top of the fence to vault over. As she walked on, she thought about how easy it had been this time. Had she and Jimmy been smaller at fourteen? Probably Jimmy had, but he was fast, strong, and wiry, and could climb a tree like a squirrel. She guessed the fear of doing something they knew was illegal and dangerous must have weighed them down.

Jane faded into a stand of hardwood trees on the other side and kept walking south. She remembered the trip as fully as she could, bringing back details and finding others in the landscape as she went. She and Jimmy had stayed away from big north-south routes because they’d wanted to be in the woods and not on a road. In the old days, Senecas used to travel south on foot to the countries of the Cherokees and Catawbas to fight. They took canoes down the rivers and streams that ran south from Seneca country into Pennsylvania, and she had read in old sources after she’d grown up that they had also used a route along the crests of the Appalachian mountain ranges to strike as far south as Georgia. A number of times in the early 1700s the sudden appearances of Iroquois war parties in the high country had raised formal protests from the governors of the colonies of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia.

While Jimmy and Jane had walked, they spoke Onondawaga by advance agreement, forcing themselves to avoid blurting out something in English. But as the time passed, they spoke more comfortably, thinking less and less about it. Jane’s vocabulary was good, but a bit formal and archaic. Much of it had come from her grandfather and grandmother, who had taken over the job of teaching her after her father died when she was eleven. But Jimmy had always lived on the reservation, and his language was more flexible and functional, replete with borrowings from English.

Now, as Jane retraced the route over twenty years later, she thought about the two fourteen-year-olds and their relationship. They had been very close at six, closer still at eight or nine, but then they had reached that strange age around ten when Jimmy stopped playing with her. She had gone back to her parents’ house for school at the end of one summer, and when she came back to the reservation in the spring, Jimmy and his friends had refused to have anything to do with her. At first she searched her memory for the crime she must have committed, but came up with nothing. Eventually her mother had asked her why she was alone all the time, and heard Jane’s story with sympathy. She explained it as “the way boys are. A time comes when they go away from us for a while. They fight a lot. It’s the last time in their lives they can do it without killing each other, so it’s probably okay. They play rough sports, they have secrets, they compete. There seems to be an agreement that girls don’t exist. It lasts two or three years, and then around seventh or eighth grade, they admit girls to the world again. It’s as though they couldn’t see us for a while, and then they can again.”

Just as her mother had predicted, when Jane came back to the reservation in the summer of her thirteenth year, not only Jimmy but the other boys too were friendly again. Jane and Jimmy became close, but forever after there was a slight reserve between them. They had each discovered things during the break that made using the different pronouns “he” and “she” seem not nearly large enough to reflect the real differences between the sexes.

Jane knew she was coming to a bad place as she walked today. The first night she had camped, just as she and Jimmy had twenty years ago, under the stars in an old apple orchard at the back of a farm. The second was so warm and still that they lay in a field under the stars, and she did the same on her second night. But on the third night the weather had changed. When they had decided to take a summer hiking trip, they hadn’t thought hard enough about rain. She remembered one of them saying, “We should set aside extra time in case it rains,” and the other replying, “The old people didn’t hide under roofs when it rained. They just kept going. Skin is waterproof.” She was pretty sure the stupid one was the fourteen-year-old Jane Whitefield.

The rain began before first light on Jane and Jimmy’s third day and didn’t stop. They walked southward under a ceiling of gray clouds that produced a steady summer downpour as though the sky were draining onto the earth. The pair walked all day in soaked clothing. They were cold at the start, and kept telling each other the rain would end in the afternoon. In the afternoon the rain was heavier. They both agreed that rainstorms in Western New York blew through from somewhere on the Canadian plains across the lakes and eastward, and since they were walking south, the rain clouds shouldn’t stay with them this long. They should just pass over them to the east and be gone. But the rain went on all day, and as night fell, the rain picked up strength.

They trudged along the edge of an alfalfa field where a farmer’s ancestors had left a windbreak of chestnuts and maples that had long ago grown too tall to stop the wind. A more recent owner had planted a set of six-foot-tall evergreens as a hedge, so if they stayed beside it they didn’t feel the full force of the northwest wind. They were approaching the second major highway, the Southern Tier Expressway, just as the dim glow from the invisible sun gave out.

To them the expressway looked almost exactly like the much-older New York State Thruway. It was illegal to climb over the fence to the margin of the big road, and dangerous to cross the lanes to the other side. Now that it was dark, the traffic seemed to be mostly giant tractor trailers carrying cargo across the southern edge of the state. Commuters had already made it to safe, dry homes, and vacationers were somewhere waiting for the weather to improve. Jane and Jimmy watched a few high, long trucks coming along the highway like trains, their headlights appearing in the near lanes somewhere a mile or so to the left, where the road curved gradually, and their taillights blinking out a few miles to the right at the crest of a low ridge. The map in Jane’s pack told them they were near the exit for the Seneca Nation Allegany Reservation.